Old kernels are not removed and horribly clutter the system

[Vasil Kolev]

I've been bitten twice by this - old kernels are not removed, slow down dpkg and use tons of space. As an example:

vasil@shrike:~$ wc -l /var/lib/dpkg/info/*2.6.28*list
   5656 /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-headers-2.6.28-15-generic.list
  10357 /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-headers-2.6.28-15.list
   2609 /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic.list
     65 /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.28-15-generic.list
  18687 total

So, from about 120k installed files one kernel takes 18k - a few of them can already use as much files in the dpkg database as the rest of the installed packages. Ubuntu updates its kernel at least 5 times during the normal distribution life, and some of us have stuff running since the dawn of time, so this starts to become a really nasty slowdown...
(and, there's also bug #414943, old kernels might be a really bad idea for some people)

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

This is more likely to be fixed as part of the kernel install or perhaps as part of the computer-janitor than by a meta package update.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

Added computer-janitor and switched to linux package.

From linux side we could consider only keeping 'three' (for example) ABI back of each series.

[to be removed (liw)]

computer-janitor already cleans up old kernel packages.

[yurik81 (yurik81)]

I just checkout latest version (1.13.3-0ubuntu2) and it doesn't propose to remove old linux kernel:(

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

Shouldn't this bug be a duplicate of bug #241368?

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

Yes, it is now a duplicate of bug 241368, but not bug 132311 (IMHO).